Robert talks to Parade Magazine

Robert Pat­tin­son is tak­ing a break from his Twi­light star­dom to play a rebel­lious New York col­lege stu­dent in Remem­ber Me. In the indie flick, the 23-year-old gets to explode with rage, fall in love with a girl (played by Lost’s Emi­lie de Ravin) and go head-to head with his dom­i­neer­ing father (played by Pierce Brosnan).

Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf found out what Pat­tin­son had in com­mon with his character’s search for identity.

Act­ing as ther­apy.
“I try and pick roles that will help me develop as a human being and I think I was going through a sim­i­lar kind of expe­ri­ence as my char­ac­ter Tyler, which I guess you could call being rebel­lious. I thought just doing the film would actu­ally help me to think about and dis­cover things that would help me in my life. I was kind of using it as a ther­apy exercise.”

His per­sonal strug­gle.
“You’re so focused on try­ing to be an indi­vid­ual and try­ing to like stamp your iden­tity on some­thing. But you kind of doubt what you want to be. You don’t accept just being part of the world. I sort of had that feel­ing. I had this obses­sion when I was younger about every­thing feel­ing kind of fake. Even­tu­ally, you just stop sort of rail­ing against every­thing around you because most peo­ple only cause prob­lems for them­selves. They’re just blind to the real­ity of things.”

Con­nect­ing with los­ing a loved one.
“I keep talk­ing about my dog all the time. It was an incred­i­ble dog, and I said in an inter­view recently he was the most impor­tant per­son in my life. My fam­ily went crazy with me for say­ing that. But, how­ever ridicu­lous it may seem to some peo­ple, my rela­tion­ship with my dog was a defin­ing moment. Hav­ing the dog die was, lit­er­ally, like the worst day of my life. It was like los­ing a fam­ily member.”

The real­ity of becom­ing an overnight suc­cess.
“I think you really cause your­self a lot of prob­lems if you start fight­ing against it. There’s noth­ing you can do. I mean, there’s no mys­ti­cism to it. Peo­ple rec­og­nize you and they want to talk to you, or want to see you. My trick is not to see them as a crowd. If you break down every crowd into indi­vid­u­als, then it’s more man­age­able. It’s just when you start see­ing these huge masses of peo­ple scream­ing at you that you start going crazy. So I try to focus on a few faces and not the mass.”

But when you’re film­ing on loca­tion in New York…
“It ended up being like more of a cir­cus than I thought it was going to be. At the begin­ning, it was ter­ri­ble. Then, about halfway through, I just sud­denly had an epiphany about it. I don’t know what hap­pened, but I know it’s just fine. I guess it’s just learn­ing how to sort of block things out. It’s like you’ve just got to be more dis­ci­plined about it.”

A les­son in anger con­trol.
“While we were film­ing, one of the secu­rity guys saw me get­ting more and more upset with the paparazzi guys. He just sort of came up and was like, ‘Imag­ine going out there and try­ing to hit one of them while, let’s say, 40 cam­eras are click­ing away.’ That was enough to kind of calm my frus­tra­tion. But, at the end of the day, you can’t say, ‘I’m not doing it until these peo­ple go away.’ You have to keep act­ing. So it was def­i­nitely way more intense than any of the Twi­light films.”

Maybe he skips the reviews.
“I didn’t like the way New Moon was treated by the crit­ics. I think it was reviewed in the con­text of just being a big fran­chise movie. When some­thing is so hyped, inevitably, there is a back­lash against it. I think Chris Weitz is an amaz­ing direc­tor. I really enjoyed the film. So the naysay­ers kind of annoyed me.”

So why not try an album?
“I kind of want to do one at the end of the year. All my friends are record­ing albums and I’m very annoyed about it. But I can’t do two things at once. I don’t know how peo­ple like Jen­nifer Lopez can act and also sing. I’m just like, ‘I can’t.’ But, hope­fully, I’ll find some time to get it together.” 

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